Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage (6 page)

Now some of the women in the room had started giggling nervously, the way you might giggle around a slightly crazy person--which was, apparently, what I had just become in their eyes.

I backed up and tried a different tack: "I mean, when did you first meet your husband?"

The grandmother sorted through her memory a bit on that one, but couldn't come up with a definitive answer aside from "long ago." It really didn't seem to be an important question for her.

"Okay,
where
did you first meet your husband?" I asked, trying to simplify the matter as much as possible.

Again, the very shape of my curiosity seemed a mystery to the grandmother. Politely, though, she gave it a try. She had never particularly
met
her husband before she married him, she tried to explain. She'd seen him around, of course. There are always a lot of people around, you know. She couldn't really remember. Anyway, she said, it is not an important question as to whether or not she knew him when she was a young girl. After all, as she concluded to the delight of the other women in the room, she certainly knows him now.

"But when did you fall in love with him?" I finally asked, point-blank.

The instant Mai translated this question, all the women in the room, except the grandmother, who was too polite, laughed aloud--a spontaneous outburst of mirth, which they then all tried to stifle politely behind their hands.

You might think this would have daunted me. Perhaps it should have daunted me. But I persisted, following up their peals of laughter with a question that struck them as even more ridiculous:

"And what do you believe is the secret to a happy marriage?" I asked earnestly.

Now they all really did lose it. Even the grandmother was openly howling with laughter. Which was fine, right? As has already been established, I am always perfectly willing to be mocked in a foreign country for somebody else's entertainment. But in this case, I must confess, all the hilarity was a bit unsettling on account of the fact that I really did not get the joke. All I could understand was that these Hmong ladies and I were clearly speaking an entirely different language here (I mean, above and beyond the fact that we were
literally
speaking an entirely different language here). But what was so specifically absurd to them about my questions?

In the weeks to come, as I replayed this conversation over in my mind, I was forced to hatch my own theory about what had made me and my hosts so foreign and incomprehensible to each other on the subject of marriage. And here's my theory: Neither the grandmother nor any other woman in that room was placing her marriage at the center of her emotional biography in any way that was remotely familiar to me. In the modern industrialized Western world, where I come from, the person whom you choose to marry is perhaps the single most vivid representation of your own personality. Your spouse becomes the most gleaming possible mirror through which your emotional individualism is reflected back to the world. There is no choice more intensely personal, after all, than whom you choose to marry; that choice tells us, to a large extent, who you are. So if you ask any typical modern Western woman how she met her husband, when she met her husband, and why she fell in love with her husband, you can be plenty sure that you will be told a complete, complex, and deeply personal narrative which that woman has not only spun carefully around the entire experience, but which she has memorized, internalized, and scrutinized for clues as to her own selfhood. Moreover, she will more than likely share this story with you quite openly--even if you are a perfect stranger. In fact, I have found over the years that the question "How did you meet your husband?" is one of the best conversational icebreakers ever invented. In my experience, it doesn't even matter whether that woman's marriage has been happy or a disaster: It will still be relayed to you as a vitally important story about her emotional being--perhaps even
the
most vitally important story about her emotional being.

Whoever that modern Western woman is, I can promise you that her story will concern two people--herself and her spouse--who, like characters in a novel or movie, are presumed to have been on some kind of personal life's journeys before meeting each other, and whose journeys then intersected at a fateful moment. (For instance: "I was living in San Francisco that summer, and I had no intention of staying much longer--until I met Jim at that party.") The story will probably have drama and suspense ("He thought I was dating the guy I was there with, but that was just my gay friend Larry!"). The story will have doubts ("He wasn't really my type; I normally go for guys who are more intellectual"). Critically, the story will end either with salvation ("Now I can't imagine my life without him!"), or--if things have turned sour--with recriminating second-guesses ("Why didn't I admit to myself right away that he was an alcoholic and a liar?"). Whatever the details, you can be certain that the modern Western woman's love story will have been examined by her from every possible angle, and that, over the years, her narrative will have been either hammered into a golden epic myth or embalmed into a bitter cautionary tale.

I'm going to go way out on a limb here and state: Hmong women don't seem to do that. Or at least not
these
Hmong women.

Please understand, I am not an anthropologist and I acknowledge that I am operating far above my pay grade when I make any conjectures whatsoever about Hmong culture. My personal experience with these women was limited to a single afternoon's conversation, with a twelve-year-old child acting as a translator, so I think it's safe to assume that I probably missed a smidge of nuance about this ancient and intricate society. I also concede that these women may have found my questions intrusive, if not outright offensive. Why should they have told their most intimate stories to me, a nosy interloper? And even if they were somehow trying to impart information to me about their relationships, it's likely that certain subtle messages fell by the wayside through mistranslation or a simple lack of cross-cultural understanding.

All that said, though, I am somebody who has spent a large chunk of her professional life interviewing people, and I trust my ability to watch and listen closely. Moreover, like all of us, whenever I enter the family homes of strangers, I am quick to notice the ways in which they may look at or do things differently than my family looks at or does things. Let us say, then, that my role that day in that Hmong household was that of a more-than-averagely observant visitor who was paying a more-than-average amount of attention to her more-than-averagely expressive hosts. In that role, and only in that role, I feel fairly confident reporting what I did
not
see happening that day in Mai's grandmother's house. I did
not
see a group of women sitting around weaving overexamined myths and cautionary tales about their marriages. The reason I found this so notable was that I have watched women all over the world weave overexamined myths and cautionary tales about their marriages, in all sorts of mixed company, and at the slightest provocation. But the Hmong ladies did not seem remotely interested in doing that. Nor did I see these Hmong women crafting the character of "the husband" into either the hero or the villain in some vast, complex, and epic Story of the Emotional Self.

I'm not saying that these women don't love their husbands, or that they never had loved them, or that they never
could
. That would be a ridiculous thing to infer, because people everywhere love each other and always have. Romantic love is a universal human experience. Evidence of passion exists in all corners of this world. All human cultures have love songs and love charms and love prayers. People's hearts get broken across every possible social, religious, gender, age, and cultural boundary. (In India, just so you know, May 3 is National Broken Hearts Day. And in Papua New Guinea, there exists a tribe whose men write mournful love songs called
namai
, which tell the tragic stories of marriages which never came to pass but should have.) My friend Kate once went to a concert of Mongolian throat singers who were traveling through New York City on a rare world tour. Although she couldn't understand the words to their songs, she found the music almost unbearably sad. After the concert, Kate approached the lead Mongolian singer and asked, "What are your songs about?" He replied, "Our songs are about the same things that everyone else's songs are about: lost love, and somebody stole your fastest horse."

So of course the Hmong fall in love. Of course they feel preference for one person over another person, or miss a beloved one who has died, or find that they inexplicably adore somebody's particular smell, or laugh. But perhaps they don't believe that any of that romantic love business has very much to do with the
actual reasons for marriage
. Perhaps they do not assume that those two distinct entities (love and marriage) must necessarily intersect--either at the beginning of the relationship or maybe ever at all. Perhaps they believe that marriage is about something else altogether.

If this sounds like a foreign or crazy notion, remember that it wasn't so long ago that people in Western culture held these same sorts of unromantic views about matrimony. Arranged marriage has never been a prominent feature of American life, of course--much less bridal kidnapping--but certainly
pragmatic
marriages were routine at certain levels of our society until fairly recently. By "pragmatic marriage," I mean any union where the interests of the larger community are considered above the interests of the two individuals involved; such marriages were a feature of American agricultural society, for instance, for many, many generations.

I personally know of one such pragmatic marriage, as it turns out. When I was growing up in my small town in Connecticut, my favorite neighbors were a white-haired husband and wife named Arthur and Lillian Webster. The Websters were local dairy farmers who lived by an inviolable set of classic Yankee values. They were modest, frugal, generous, hardworking, unobtrusively religious, and socially discreet members of the community who raised their three children to be good citizens. They were also enormously kind. Mr. Webster called me "Curly" and let me ride my bike for hours on their nicely paved parking lot. Mrs. Webster--if I was very good--would sometimes let me play with her collection of antique medicine bottles.

Just a few years ago, Mrs. Webster passed away. A few months after her death, I went out to dinner with Mr. Webster, and we got to talking about his wife. I wanted to know how they had met, how they had fallen in love--all the romantic beginnings of their life together. I asked him all the same questions, in other words, that I would eventually ask the Hmong ladies in Vietnam, and I got the same sorts of replies--or lack of replies. I couldn't dredge up a single romantic memory from Mr. Webster about the origins of his marriage. He couldn't even remember the precise moment when he had first met Lillian, he confessed. She had always been around town, as he recalled. It was certainly not love at first sight. There was no moment of electricity, no spark of instant attraction. He had never become infatuated with her in any way.

"So why did you marry her?" I asked.

As Mr. Webster explained in his typically open and matter-of-fact Yankee manner, he had gotten married because his brother had instructed him to get married. Arthur was soon going to be taking over the family farm and therefore he needed a wife. You cannot run a proper farm without a wife, any more than you can run a proper farm without a tractor. It was an unsentimental message, but dairy farming in New England was an unsentimental business, and Arthur knew his brother's edict was on target. So, the diligent and obedient young Mr. Webster went out there into the world and dutifully secured himself a wife. You got the feeling, listening to his narrative, that any number of young ladies might have gotten the job of being "Mrs. Webster," instead of Lillian herself, and it wouldn't have made a huge difference to anyone at the time. Arthur just happened to settle on the blonde one, the one who worked over at the Extension Service in town. She was the right age for it. She was nice. She was healthy. She was good. She would do.

The Websters' marriage, therefore, clearly did not launch from a place of passionate, personal, and fevered love--no more than the Hmong grandmother's marriage had. We might therefore assume, then, that such a union is "a loveless marriage." But we have to be careful about drawing such assumptions. I know better, at least when it comes to the case of the Websters.

In her waning years, Mrs. Webster was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. For almost a decade, this once-powerful woman wasted away in a manner that was agonizing to watch for everyone in the community. Her husband--that pragmatic old Yankee farmer--took care of his wife at home the entire time she was dying. He bathed her, fed her, gave up freedoms in order to keep watch over her, and learned to endure the dreadful consequences of her decay. He tended to this woman long after she knew who he was anymore--even long after she knew who she herself was anymore. Every Sunday, Mr. Webster dressed his wife in nice clothing, put her in a wheelchair, and brought her to services at the same church where they had been married almost sixty years earlier. He did this because Lillian had always loved that church, and he knew she would've appreciated the gesture if only she had been conscious of it. Arthur would sit there in the pew beside his wife, Sunday after Sunday, holding her hand while she slowly ebbed away from him into oblivion.

And if that isn't love, then somebody is going to have to sit me down and explain to me very carefully what love actually is.

That said, we have to be careful, too, not to assume that all arranged marriages across history, or all pragmatic marriages, or all marriages that begin with an act of kidnapping, necessarily resulted in years of contentment. The Websters were lucky, to an extent. (Though they also put a good deal of work into their marriage, one suspects.) But what Mr. Webster and the Hmong people perhaps have in common is a notion that the emotional place where a marriage begins is not nearly as important as the emotional place where a marriage finds itself toward the end, after many years of partnership. Moreover, they would likely agree that there is not one special person waiting for you somewhere in this world who will make your life magically complete, but that there are any number of people (right in your own community, probably) with whom you could seal a respectful bond. Then you could live and work alongside that person for years, with the hope that tenderness and affection would be the gradual outcome of your union.